Virtual fitting rooms gaining traction

With virtual fitting rooms having recently proved themselves the key to online retailers bid for customer satisfaction, when they can’t actually physically try clothes on for themselves, new improvements are already underway.

Fits.me, one of the most successful forms of Virtual Fitting Room solutions, has already proved in research that customer returns can be reduced by 77 percent with their fit rooms, has come upgraded their service.

Jermyn Street, tailor, Hawes and Curtis was the first retailer to sign up for Fits.me in 2010, and success has led to a new bevy of key men’s and women’s fashion retailers, such as L.K. Bennett, Adidas, Barbour By Mail, Boden, Ermenegildo Zegna, Hawes & Curtis, Hugo Boss, Nicole Farhi, Otto, Pretty Green, Superdry, and Thomas Pink. The new version of the Fits.me Virtual Fitting Room enables retailers and brands to offer an accurate, fun, sophisticated and, now, much more stylish means for shoppers to ensure they buy the right size when buying online. Now named, Fit Advisor, it uses a shopper’s measurements to generate and display intuitive graphical indicators showing how an item will fit, but – unlike the Fits.me Virtual Fitting Room – does not display a photograph of the item to show how it will fit.

Heikki Haldre, founder and chief executive of Fits.me, said: “Fits.me’s greatest strength – its precision and accuracy – comes from its creation and development in the world of academia. The new version of the Fits.me Virtual Fitting Room and Fit Advisor add a layer of wonderful, stylish design to the fitting room experience, which meets or exceeds the expectations of even the hardest-to-please e-commerce director.”

“More than one e-commerce director to whom we have shown the new virtual fitting room has wondered out loud, and only half-jokingly, whether the photographs we take for our database could replace their existing product photography,” he added. Other virtual fit rooms upping their offering include FaceCake offer simpler solutions that have the feel of a video game. Its Swivel product uses a camera to feed your image onto a monitor. Then you can pull clothing from the virtual racks and spin around for a 3-D try-on. This option also includes product recommendations – ‘Did you try this blouse with this skirt?’

It’s a big step for the online fashion domain. For as long as there have ecommerce sites , there have been companies creating virtual fitting rooms trying to enable customers to gauge fit and size. However up to now, most haven’t gained traction because they require entering lots of precise measurements and other information, says Michelle Madhok, founder of sale and fashion site SheFinds.com. “That’s been prohibitive — it’s too much work,” she says. “If I’m shopping online, I’m not ready to go grab my tape measurer.”